In response to a question about Hoffa's comments, Mr Carney said, firmly, "Anyone who has seen the entire quote from Mr. Hoffa, and not the edited footage being run by Fox so-called news and all the other right-wing media in the US, knows that Hoffa was speaking about taking the Republicans out electorally, and nothing more. As usual the right-wing media is acting on the direction of Karl Rove and the Cock brothers to make unions and the president look bad, and to hide the fact that sitting Republican members of congress and the media have openly, frequently, and unambiguously called for violence against the president and Dems in general over the past 20 years. The White House stands by Mr. Hoffa's statement- the ENTIRE statement, and appreciates his support, that of his union, and of organized labor as a whole"

Just once firing back at the real enemy instead of supporters would have me right back on the bandwagon. But they just are incapable of it.

"There have been times when our side, when Democrats aren’t always as flexible as we need to be," Obama said. "Sometimes I do get frustrated when I hear folks say, 'You can't make any changes to any government programs.' Well, that can't be right."

"The Republican tax cuts from 10 years ago have resulted in the biggest job loss in history. We now have more people in need than ever before - all due directly to the reckless spending and top-heavy tax cuts enacted by the right wing congress. Now this same group of reactionaries wants to slash subsistance benefits from these same people who were put out of work by their disastrous policies. Well, it's not going to happen while I'm in the White House. They also voted to raise the debt ceiling every single year that George Bush was in office, and now are holding our neediest citizens hostage for the simple reason to crash the economy and blame it on me. Well, the hostage taking is over. There will be no cuts to vital programs, period. They can resume their lying and terrorism within those parameters"

In order for a political awakening to take place, an overhaul (or overthrow) of the media will have to be made. IMO once that is done, democracy may be restored fairly simply. But I don't think that's coming any time soon. As long as the teabaggers like being slaves, and as long as we're content to think that signing useless petitions and standing in the snow holding signs while fascism rolls in constitutes "resistance", the plutocrats have absolutely nothing to fear.

There is absolutely nothing the hate radio addicts won't believe, if the Lie Machine tells them it's true.

- Hitler was a leftist

- Cutting taxes raises tax revenues

- Obama wants to take away every gun in the US

- We're 9 trillion dollars in the hole because of food stamps

- Osama bin Laden (or someone else this week) is directing the world's billion Muslims to get pregnant and come to the US to have their babies so 20 years from now there will be a billion Muslim terrorists that are US citizens.

The wingnuts are mind-numbingly, outrageously ignorant, and like being that way. Get used to it, and get ready to deal with them

1. Open an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame. Treason was committed, and no one was held to account. Would this create jobs? No. Would it remove one tumor of the cancer that is the GOP? Yes.

2. Pardon Don Siegelmann. His prosecution and incarceration were political, staged, contrived, and illegal. Find out who was responsible, and charge those people with RICO crimes. Would this create jobs? No. Would it remove one more tumor of the cancer that is the GOP? Yes.

3. Open an investigation into the authorization of torture by Bush and Cheney. These are crimes. When it is found that they did in fact approve and encourage war crimes, take them into custody. Hand them to the world court or to the Iraq government for prosecution. Two more tumors removed.

4. Hire David Iglesias and have him set up, quickly, an investigation into the purging of US Attorneys due to their (non-) allegiance to Karl Rove. Those prosecutions would have had viewers riveted to their TV screens for months. More tumors gone.

5. Appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate Slappy Thomas's confirmation hearing - a real one investigation this time. The women he tormented number enough to fill a small dining hall. After a couple days of testimony, "Long Dong Silver" would resign in shame and slither back to his pitiful, psycho, teabagger wife. One more tumor.

6. Declare, out loud, every time a microphone is within sight, that the Great Recession was caused, nursed, and ministered by the people who are now complaining about it. Their Wall Street pals, their evil policies, and their partisanism caused it, and they were NOT going to be asked for their ideas on how to get out of it. The 2008 election was a total "refudiation" of malevolent right-wing policies and people, so their contribution should be given absolutely zero consideration.

These steps, with some leadership, would have us now looking at a Super Majority in the Senate, and a lot of silence from the DINOS.

for such an astute campaigner, the prez has been completely inept politically since taking office. he gives money to the corporations, they give it to his enemies. He gives in to Wall street, then they refuse to hire, and give money to his enemies. He refuses to prosecute their crimes, they will now impeach him. He lets the enemies of America put their disastrous provisions into bills, then takes the blame when they turn out to be disastrous.

I wonder if he will regret all of these disasters in his memoirs in a few years.

I actually believed, while writing checks, phoning, walking the neighborhoods in 2008, that this would be a transformative presidency. I really thought we had Boner, Limpballs, and Murdoch on the ropes. I thought we were electing an outsider who was going to take the country back from the gangsters who ran it into the ground since 2000.

I wanted Obama to pardon Don Siegleman and fire all of the Rove-appointed US attorneys during his first week in office, just to show the Repukes that their crimes had not gone unnoticed, and that this president was going to avenge their most hideous offenses out of hand, without waiting for permission. I wanted investigations opened up into the lies that Bush told to start the illegal invasion of Iraq. I wanted some sign that those of us who came to loathe Rove's version of the US were going to get our country back.

I thought that the election results made it quite clear that the country didn't want the Repukes running the economy or anything else any more. We rejected their economic theories, their corporatism, their opposition to civil rights, their corruption, terrorism and fear-mongering, their incompetence. It should have been quite clear to the president's team that they had the upper hand, that the electorate wanted them to run the country without any of the Repukes' failed ideas intruding. Instead, the president immediately "reached across the aisle" and "compromised" with people who America wanted shut out of the government - period. He (and the congressional Dems) conceded to all sorts of Repuke demands HCR, only to see them not vote for it anyway. He cozied up to Wall Street, and they proceeded to shit all over him after he'd given up his dignity and his mandate to appease them. Someone wrote here the other day that "He had to give on to the repukes otherwise he wouldn't have gotten their votes". So what? Stand your ground, and then go on TV and tell the people something like this:

"you voted me in to undo the disaster that Mr. Boner and Mr. McConnell laid on the country. Well, I can't, and I am not going to listen to the same failed ideas that got us here in the first place. They insist on staying on this same road - well, it's not going to happen while I am here. Their policies, tactics, media machine, and lies were rejected soundly, and I am here to make sure that that repudiation is enforced.

Since they won't let me undo their legislative disaster, we will do what we can without them. The DoJ will, within a year, find out who leaked Valerie Plame's identity and why, and the persons responsible will be prosecuted for treason. Governor Siegelman will be freed, and the DoJ will get to the bottom of the fraudulent election and malicious prosecution that led to his incarceration. Election tampering and political prosecutions are federal offenses, and so the AG will pursue them as such. The political firings in the US Attorney's office will be investigated in open court. David Iglesias will head a new corruption task force that will unearth and publicize every detail of this outrageous corruption of the high levels of law enforcement. Starting immediately the military brass will work with me to pursue the most aggressive withdrawal schedule feasible for President Bush's war that has destroyed our nation's treasury and morality. The AG will, within the month, research the legal minutiae that we need to take care of so that gay Americans can enjoy the same privileges as everyone else. Finally, Governor Howard Dean will convene a committee, working pro bono, to figure out how to get health care for everyone in this country. We are the only industrialized nation where people go without. By the time I leave office that won't be true any more."

Instead, he let the same people rejected convincingly by the voters tell him what to do. The implication was, time after time, that Boner and McConnell and Beck were more important to him than the people who elected him. Still a Dem, still a liberal, still a believer that the Republican party is a far more dangerous enemy that Al Qaeda, but just not as enthusiastic as I was 30 months ago. I also agree with Frank that this is a bad omen not for this election, but for the future of the US

The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

....

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

I was one of the president's most vocal and ardent supporters. The ass-kicking we gave the Repukes in Nov 2008 was a signal that the entire Bush/Rove/Hate Radio/Fox "News" agenda was rejected, and should be done away with. Boner, McConnell, Cantor were soundly repudiated by We The People in 2008. Then almost before the door of the oval office hit Smirk in the ass, the president started reaching across the aisle to the very people we'd said we don't want to be in charge any more. He triangulated, appeased, negotiated. Exactly the reasons I supported him instead of Hil in the primaries.

Also, as many have pointed out, the Repukes continue to get away with horrific crimes, and every time they are not prosecuted, the next round gets worse. His failure to apprehend Rove, Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and Bybee will likely lead to yet another impeachment next year, and even more egregious offenses by president Palin/Gingrinch/Huckelberry in 2013-2017.

Before the USSR collapsed, US capitalism had to be humanized because otherwise people might turn toward socialism. After The Bear went belly-up, there was no longer any alternative system for the people to turn to. Our Disaster Capitalists could unleash every sort of hell on the hoi polloi and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. Bring in the Big Media propagandists to convince the bone ignorant that the problem is ferners, blacks, and educated people, and you have a perfect recipe for a fascist state. Simmer for 15 years, and here we are.

IMO this is the first front on which we should begin the reclamation of the US. Hedges, Johnston and others have written that it will soon be time to fight, flee, or succumb. Big Media is a cancer on the country. 20 years ago, in Stage 1, it could have been cured fairly simply by removing a few tumors - Limpballs, Rove, Luntz. It has now progressed to Stage 4, and the treatment will have to be radical, and may not be successful. For instance, Hartmann said yesterday that the newest Big Media meme is that the president is a "suicide bomber" - i. e. terrorist. If a few of the purveyors of this seditious lie were to suffer some really severe consequences, quickly and publicly, we could begin to have a different dialog. It is a travesty that Limpballs is allowed to call the president a terrorist, to our soldiers, on tax payer-funded medium. But there is nothing legally that can be done to stop it.

That said, a quick glance at DU reveals that even people who call themselves Dems are addicted to right-wing lies. Every day we are showered with the lies of King Glenn, the Obese Pedophile, Fox "News", Oliver North, Morning Secretary Killer, and so on. Some have bought the "Obama is going to take all of our guns away" BS. Others hate unions and blame them for all of the job theft we've experienced. Hour after hour they subject themselves to the propaganda, then complain about it on DU. To which I say, .

So I guess the point is that if and when we decide to take our country back, Big Media would be an excellent place to start. There just isn't the will power right now though.

Any change that occurs peacefully at this point will be for the worse - if actual Dems and other patriots just step aside while we slip into complete fascism. Any movement in the correct direction is going to have to overcome the full power of the Bush/Bankster/Media cabal. We did our best in November 2008 to rectify the situation lawfully, and it's obvious today that it was woefully inadequate.

My worst fear is not that we'll end up living in Franco's Spain or Stalin's Russia. It's that we'll go there without any resistance. FWIW, I plan to try to expatriate in a couple years if some changes haven't begun for the good. It sickens me to have to live the last 20 years of my life in a different country, but I would rather flee than live under President Palin.

As you probably know, however, many of Hitler's modern-day fans (Marge Schott, for example) like to say, "he had a good idea, then he went too far". Indeed, if he had stopped with elimination of the Jews, and not tried to take over Europe, would the world have fought back?

At present, the Bush family are content with terrorizing Americans and engaging in some geographically confined military actions which enrich them and their friends, but don't draw the ire of the rest of the world. Maybe the 4th Reich is more savvy than the 3rd. THey have certainly been in power longer, and their propaganda apparatus makes Goebbels' look like a grade school newspaper in comparison. I recently scolded a DUer for threatening to write a strongly worded e-mail to Chuck Todd after a typical right-wing segment on one of the interchangeable GOP TV outlets. She replied that it's "good to let them know we're onto them". There is the major difference this time around - the German Jews didn't worship their oppressors.

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